


A Willful Blindness

by remembertowrite



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Alex-centric, Episode Tag: 204 Voices Carry, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Paranoia, Questionable Journalistic Decisions, Trust Issues, basically Alex slowly loses it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 20:35:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6209161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's seeing shadows in her peripheral vision, hearing ominous knocks in the darkness. She tries to fight back, relying on the disbelief of the strongest skeptic she knows. (But it's futile). Set a few days after 204, before Alex's sabbatical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Willful Blindness

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally posted on [Tumblr](http://surely-you-jess.tumblr.com/post/140733286713/willful-blindness) in the early morning of March 9, 2016.

_**Willful blindness:** Legal: A term used in criminal law to refer to the acts of a person who intentionally fails to be informed about matters that would make the person criminally liable. It describes an attempt to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting oneself in a position to be unaware of facts which create liability._

###

Her feet pound the wet pavement, a metronome synced to the beat of electronic music incongruous with the tempo of the rainfall. Fat, wet drops splatter on the hood of her raincoat, shattering into tinier droplets and finding their way to their inevitable demise on the asphalt.

Alki Trail extends out in front of her like a red carpet for a rain-soaked insomniac. On the right, cars fly by on wings of water; the waters of the Puget Sound churn menacingly under gloomy skies to her left. Her sneakers squelch underneath her, and she lands heavily in a puddle hidden among the cracked surface of the sidewalk. Water soaks through her socks and the bottoms of her leggings.

Well, shit. She resents Dr. Bernier’s new advice—“Oh, Alex, you know what helps keep a positive mindset? Exercise. Exercise is very important. It will relieve your stress.” Yeah right. She’s even more tired than before she started her new running regimen.

At least the shadows delight in her early morning jogs, chasing after her like predators on the hunt.

Almost as if on cue, her phone buzzes in her pocket like a device possessed. She sprints across the street, cutting behind a speeding sedan that honks at her in displeasure, and she cows under the awning of a bakery. The scent of freshly baked bread wafts through the shop’s exhaust vent, and _God_ does she want a bagel.

She answers the call without checking the caller ID (each time a new mystery she allows herself, one she can easily solve).

“Hello?” she croaks, her voice scratchy and strained from the running and the rain and the lack of sleep.

“Alex, I need to speak with you,” comes the harsh reply, the dark tone that she’d recognize anywhere. His voice is a comfort. It wraps her like a thermal blanket after a marathon, the foil crinkling as she pulls it tighter around her rain-soaked torso. She shivers up against the cold glass of the bakery window, withdrawing further from the rain (further from the shadows).

“Dr. Strand, what’s going on?” she asks. Her heart speeds up like she’s teetering on the edge of Alki Trail, deciding whether or not to dive into the 45-degree water for a morning swim. Is it a break in the case? Maybe someone’s seen Coralee? Or did Thomas Warren decided to drop by and return the coffee he stole all those months ago?

“This,” he hisses in that husky tone, the one trembling with bitten-back fury that sends a thrill down her spine and sets her on the defense.

He plays the audio clip from the latest episode. She hears Nic’s annoying lecture on the ethical bounds of eavesdropping. Nic’s voice barely cuts through the static from feedback of the phone speaker, but her own admission of turning on the talkback mic comes through as clearly as if Strand were standing right next to her, the sad-looking nylon of his windbreaker rustling against her arm. (She wouldn’t mind that—fastidious to the point of practical foresight, he would at least have an umbrella that she could share.)

“Oh, that. I didn’t think you listened to the podcast anymore.” She rocks back and forth from foot to foot, newfound spunk in her sway.

“This is a new low, even for _you_ , Alex. You have a history of heedless sensationalism and misrepresentation—”

“That’s not fair,” she starts, his dark voice stoking a fire deep in her gut.

“But your blatant disregard for the law—”

“ _My_ disregard? Only two weeks ago you were trying to get Paul to imitate—”

“That was different. Your newest feat crosses lines both professional and per—”

“Personal? Are you _shitting_ me right now, Richard? You’ve been hardly enough of a friend _to_ cross a personal line with—”

A sharp rapping on glass derails the ferocity of her train of thought. She turns her head to the bakery window and notices the face of a distinctly disgruntled employee. Strand’s heated words continue, but they fall deaf on her ears as she studies the small clouds of white flour that erupt each time the baker’s knuckles make contact with the window. She raps on the glass back at the baker, irritable after only a few hours of sleep.

“Silence, Alex? This is beneath you,” she hears Strand reprove. She covers the phone speaker with a flat palm and composes herself with a tired sigh, striving for the kind of resigned, bone-deep calm her father achieves every time her mom probes about why she’s not married yet.

“Look, I’ll be in the studio in an hour. I’ll talk to you then, okay?”

Strand is silent for a beat, and she thinks he’s the biggest hypocrite she’s had the pleasure of befriending.

“I’ll bring breakfast,” she tempts, and even though the embers of her rage still smolder, tending to Strand’s well-being has rooted itself in her like an instinctive need. “I know this great bagel place. And I’m sure you could use calories that aren’t Cliff bars.”

Another beat passes.

“Fine,” he snaps, and hangs up in a huff.

She pockets her phone and flashes a weary smile at the baker as she enters the tiny shop. The shadows smile back.

“Two toasted multigrain, with cream cheese, please.”

The baker scowls.

###

The savory smell of carby multigrain heaven is second only to the taste of bagel. She chews slow and content like a cow ruminating over grass hay, her intellect fading away so she can focus on the singular experience of cracked oats and barley covering the calorie-dense rapture that is her breakfast. She makes a note to bring a bagel to her next exorcism, to chase the demons away, and she can’t tell if the shadows are laughing at her or with her for her ridiculous thought.

The hour of distance and the bagel peace offering have seemingly mitigated some of Strand’s wrath, for he too sits in semi-companionable silence eating his bagel. (Or at least his demeanor has softened from _I’m going to drop you like a hot potato for three months again_ to _I will happily accept groveling in the form of bagels as payback_.) Flecks of flaxseed stick in his beard, and she stifles her snicker with a gulp of coffee. This is simply the best $4.87 she’s ever spent on him.

“Good bagel, right? I found this little bakery in West Seattle right near the water.”

He sighs in that _Alex Reagan, you will be the death of me_ sort of way that tells her it’s time to for a Stern Talking To about Serious Dr. Strand Business TM. Her heart sinks, and the exhaustion from getting only two hours of sleep finally catches up to her. All she wants to do is sit with him in the quiet studio eating bagels and soak up his soothing presence until her coworkers start to trickle in at 8.

“Alex, you broke the law. You’ve violated what I’m certain is an untold number of journalistic standards, and you’ve crossed a line of common decency.”

He stares at her through thick lenses with a deep-set frown. His hands are twitching, maybe with poorly restrained anger, and suddenly she understands why he was suspected of murder twenty years ago. He does have a tendency to explode (not that she’s been any better lately). She sits rigid in her seat, bagel abandoned on the plate on her desk.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her hands clasped together. She rubs her left thumb across the top of her opposite hand and hunches her shoulders inward so she’s occupying as little space as she can. “The only reason I listened in is because you’ve been hiding so many things.”

“Because it’s not relevant to your investigation,” he declares, and crosses his long legs. “We’ve discussed this before.”

“Okay, but that’s unfair. I’m trying to _help_ you.” If it were anyone else, she’d be chagrined by her desperation, but somehow the usual rules don’t apply to Dr. Strand. She reaches out for his hand, but the sting of his words swats her away, a fly with broken wings.

“I need to know you won’t pull a stunt like this again if I’m going to continue with this arrangement.”

She balks internally at his use of “arrangement,” but outwardly she nods.

“Good.” And he’s all business again. “You’ve mentioned before that you have an audio expert as a contact? I have a file I’d like to send for analysis.”

“Yeah, Dr. Pullman’s a structural acoustician at the university,” she responds, curiosity piqued. “What’s in the file?”

She subconsciously reaches for her recorder, but Strand’s glare stops her dead in her tracks. Busted. Again.

“That’s need-to-know,” he scolds. “Look, can you send it or not?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Excellent.” He shifts in his seat and rolls the remains of the bagel wrapper into a small ball to put in the trash. “And thank you for the breakfast.”

The simple politeness is so unexpected that it freezes her mid-movement. There’s an intensity to his sidelong gaze, half looking at her and half somewhere else, and she feels like a mouse under the observant sentry of a cat, a feline lithe and swift with just a hint of vicious delight in the stalking of prey.

The crumbs in his beard ruin the aesthetic, though. She can’t help but giggle.

“What?” he spits at her. She stands up and unthinkingly brushes the specks of bagel out of his beard, running the sickly bleach-white skin of her fingers along his jaw line. In that moment the yearning to grab him by the collar and wrench him down to her level overwhelms her. She lets go of his chin and basks in his full attention, skeptical and confused as per usual.

“Crumbs,” she chirps by way of explanation, and leaves him to his devices in the break room.

###

2:44am: A time of night where she hovers on the edge of sleep, crust forming in the corners of her eyes. The bodily refusal to enter her REM cycle drives her to roll to the edge of the bed. The sheets and comforter wrap around her arms like a straitjacket, and it’s a struggle to wrench out a limb and reach for the phone watching vigil on the nightstand.

She enters her PIN (a hard-learned lesson after suspicious messages sneaked onto her phone), and opens up the recorder app.

“A sixth night of staying awake past 2. I’m getting really, really exhausted at work,” she explains to herself, to Dr. Bernier, to the thousands of podcast listeners who will hear her foggy musings in the next episode.

“Dr. Pullman got back to me with the analysis on the most recent audio file today. Well, yesterday. I actually didn’t listen to it. I wanted to, but I made a promise to Dr. Strand, and I don’t want to risk alienating him again.”

She taps her hand against the case of her phone, suppressing the desire to open up her email and listen in. If she can just hold out through the night, she can interrogate Strand about the file’s contents in the morning. There’s nothing like a cup of his favorite tea to lower his guard. The thought of another shared breakfast eases her irritation with him.

“At least Dr. Strand’s been around,” she tells the recorder app. “That’s been a nice change of pace. It feels… better with him around. Safer, somehow.”

She pulls herself up into a sitting position and wraps her arms around her knees. Her warm forehead finds solace on the chilled skin of her kneecaps.

Then, in terrifying clarity, two soft taps contest the safety of having Strand around.

“Oh my God,” she whispers into her phone speaker. She would dial 911, but she needs to keep the recorder app running.

Another two insistent knocks deny the involvement of any holy being.

She flicks on the light, her breathing hurried. The auburn walls and the smiling faces of her family framed on the wall appraise her with a detachment common to inanimate objects. The shadows wave hello with their long claws, assuring her that all is normal in her hellscape of a home.

“Dr. Strand would tell me I’m just seeing and hearing things. That it’s just apophenia.”

Quieter than previously, as if not to spook her, the knocker answers at first with one tap, then with two. Yes and no?

“It’s all in my head, he’d say. ‘It’s nothing to fret over. I’m surprised you pay any heed to such common ambient noises. You live in the city—isn’t there noise all the time outside your window?’”

She breathes out long and slow, savoring his imagined words and the way his deep voice speaks with an air of authority, a tone so self-assured she’d accept anything he says as gospel. Her bedroom returns to darkness, and the shadows express their grotesque joy at the disappearance of light through ritualistic dance. She bids them goodnight with a shaky wave of her hand.

“‘Goodnight, Alex,’” she whispers in Strand’s voice. He shoos away her shadowy stalkers like they’re children that have invaded his study, and she falls into fitful rest under his watchful eye.

###

“Coffee,” she offers, lifting the mug in her left hand up. The overhead light in her office is faint (one of the light bulbs has died), so it’s the shafts of streetlights filtering in through the windows and the electronic glow of her desktop monitor that highlight the man tapping away on her computer keyboard.

He wordlessly motions to a spot on her desk and continues his frantic typing. She wonders if he was a court stenographer in a past life.

She places the coffee near his hand, trading it for the heavy bound book on Sumerian lore she’s been reading. She sips her own coffee (decaf, doctor’s orders) and gazes longingly at the monitor, an addict craving another hit of an Internet-based high, all Tweets and emails and lightning-fast answers to her Google queries.

His eyes flick to her face, silently questioning why she’s ceased in her work.

“This is way too World of Warcraft for me,” she jokes, her voice breathy and weak with exhaustion. “You’re probably better suited all this ‘Apsû’ and ‘Kigul’ and ‘hymn of the Lugga Id-Dagan of Larsa’ stuff.”

The corners of his lips twitch in such a way that she knows she’s mispronounced at least half the Sumerian words.

“Iddin-Dagan,” he corrects her as if on instinct, a glint of didactic delight reflecting off his glasses. “A Sumerian king best known for the poem about his marital rite. A quite… provocative work, you might say.”

“Fascinating.” She yawns and takes another drink of her tragically caffeine-free coffee, secretly hoping he’ll continue speechifying like he normally does. The measured cadence and the baritone lilt of his voice could soothe her right into sleep.

He frowns at her. “You could start a public records search on Lovell Holdings,” he suggests, and pushes her laptop across the desk so she can reach it.

“Oh, well, I’m supposed to be screen-free after 8.” She fidgets with the weighty mythology book in her hands, fingering its worn spine.

“It’s 1 in the morning, Alex.”

She strains her droopy eyes, and is suddenly furious with Nic for taking off with Amalia hours before.

“You’re right. I really wasn’t going to sleep tonight anyway.”

The laptop clicks open, the hum of the hardware buzzing with familiarity in her lap. The LED backlight temporarily blinds her, so she tones down the screen brightness.

“So what am I looking to connect this company to?”

He’s returned his attentions to her desktop computer, eyes scanning what she assumes are lines and lines of text. Won’t his already poor vision worsen from staring at a screen for so many hours straight?

“Any international corporation based in London will be a good start.” He doesn’t look away from the monitor.

“And why are we looking in London?”

“That’s not important.”

“O _kay_ then.” He doesn’t dignify her with a response.

It’s with a sigh that she starts combing through property records on the county registrar’s site, and she almost misses her book of Sumerian demons. Almost. But she won’t provide herself possible inspiration for demonic visions tonight.

She would thank God for Strand’s shadow-deterring presence, but she holds off. Strand wouldn’t like that.

###

It’s the third night she’s on a device past her screen-free time. Dr. Bernier won’t be pleased.

A small part of her relishes the rebellion. She’s taken every free second she can these past few days to surf around on Twitter and Reddit and any other soul-sucking website that vacuums up her time. Her main relationship these days is with her smartphone—it sleeps with her at night, it wakes her in the morning, it accompanies her everywhere she goes. It’s the Clyde to her Bonnie, the peanut butter to her jam, the Strand to her, well, self.

Maybe that last comparison is inaccurate. Strand flew back to Chicago yesterday on Important Conspiracy Business, so her office has lost the demon warding his presence offers. Her shadow companions have returned, almost a comfort in Strand’s absence, and the drool dribbling between the razor teeth of their smiles has her concerned in the same way a pet owner worries about forgetting to feed the dog.

Some dogs are more vicious than others.

She narrows her eyes to block out the hungry sway of the shadows. Willful blindness has been always an effective defense for her.

She taps on the glowing touch screen of her phone and opens her email. There, saved at the top of her inbox, Dr. Pullman’s week-old flagged message waves at her in a plea for surrender. The audio attachment has gobbled up 15 percent of her total inbox memory, but the properties of the file indicate that it’s only a minute long. Dr. Pullman must have enhanced certain audio lines, pulling out the interesting minuscule background noises.

She glances forlornly at the seat in front of her desk that the ghost of yesterday’s Dr. Strand occupies. Stern and focused, shifting occasionally to stroke his beard or jot something down, he ignores her in tolerant silence.

“You never answered my question about the audio file,” she says to him.

He looks at her with the _Are you really asking about this nonsense again?_ face she’s become too familiar with. He removes his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose with his index and middle fingers.

The shadows chortle at her from the sidelines.

She rockets up out of her seat in rage. “What do you care? You’re not even _here_!”

He finally meets her eyes with a full, uninterrupted gaze.

“No, I’m not,” he states, and his physical from fades from her vision.

She slams her finger against the phone as furiously as one can open an email attachment in blind rage. This is, to say, not very much.

“It’s the thought that counts, darling,” her mother whispers in her ear.

She’s about to thank her mom for the ever so witty use of cliché when the file starts playing on her phone.

There’s a woman speaking in a foreign language—Russian or Chechen, judging by the phonetics—and some strange disharmonic music in the background that sounds like a poor recreation of Tchaikovsky in a minor key.

Another woman speaks, addressing the first woman by name. _Charlie_.

Holy shit. Has Charlie taken up the mantle of her grandfather, continuing the search for mysterious demonic relics? Charlie _had_ been in Rome the last time they’d spoken.

She opens up her texting app and fires off a message to Strand.

_You never told me Charlie is involved in the family business._

She glances at the time and realizes that Strand might be asleep, since it’s two hours later where he is.

 _Sorry it’s so late – forgot about the time difference_ , she offers as an apology. She pictures him awakening at the abrupt buzzing of his phone, and then falling out of his cot as he reaches for the source of the sudden racket. She giggles.

Her phone buzzes with his reply: _Why are you still looking into my family?_

Then, in rapid succession, several texts that have the shadows in uproarious laughter at her embarrassment:

_Did you listen to the audio file?_

_You’re unbelievable, Alex._

_How you ever managed a decade in your profession without scandal is a mystery worthy of the ‘Black Tapes’ themselves._

She scowls at her phone, half-annoyed and half-amused at his snarky derision. There’s something so ineffably _Strand_ in those insults.

 _And yes, it’s rather late_ , he texts her again.

 _Not late enough to care about brevity, apparently_ , she fires back, a small smile creeping on her face. She misses the verbal jousting, the rakish way he’d argue from a position of pure confidence over this week’s ghost or demon or inky apparition, his assurances that none of it was real and that she shouldn’t even waste a second of thought on such drivel.

 _I hope you won’t be quoting Hamlet next over text message_ , Strand replies.

_Don’t tempt me. You know, I’d rather quote this audio file of yours. Charlie’s name came up._

The three bubbles that indicate he’s typing a response pop up in a small balloon. They disappear and reappear a few maddening times. At last, he sends a single text as a response.

_Since brevity is the soul of wit: Goodnight, Alex._

She’s circling something huge, she can feel it, but Strand’s fortress walls have shut her out on all sides. Incensed with helplessness, she shoots back several messages that go unanswered.

_Dr. Strand, are you serious right now?_

_Stop avoiding the question._

_Okay, I apologize, it was rude of me to wake you so late at night._

_You know what, no, I know you were already awake. Ruby said you don’t sleep much anyway._

_Two hours of screen-free time before bed can help with sleeplessness. So I’m told._

_I know you’re still awake. Answer me._

_???_

_Richard?_

_Is Charlie in danger?_

_Did she get too deep into something?_

_Oh God I hope she’s okay. Is there anything I can do?_

After forty fitful minutes and her dozen texts, Strand breaks the radio silence to address a single point.

_God doesn’t exist, Alex._

She pauses, considers his response, and answers with careful thought.

 _Are_ you _okay?_

He doesn’t reply.

###

Strand’s office was a clutter of newspaper and string when she was last here, but now it’s devolved into a downright disaster zone. She wants to look up FEMA’s phone number or call in the National Guard, because there’s something deeply unsettling about Dr. Richard Strand, the holder of Yale doctorates in religion, psychology, and mythology, being a _slob_ in the place he works and sleeps. It’s not even like two puzzles pieces that don’t fit together; it’s more as if someone took Strand, the planchet of an antique Ouija board, and tried to fit him alongside the pink and blue plastic cars of the Game of Life.

He’s stepped out of the office for a meeting with some professional contact from Ukraine who’s in town for some conference. Ruby didn’t divulge many details.

She had breezed right past Ruby and made a beeline for Strand’s office, just in case he was hiding again. This time, he wasn’t. (And this time, Ruby didn’t even try to stop her. Strand’s inner sanctum may as well be hers, the way her office has become his space, even the ghost of him.)

She leaves the door ajar and wades her way between heaps of boxes. There’s a small cot on the back wall with a sleeping bag that probably was top-of-the-line camping gear in 1987. She winces in sympathetic pain at the soreness Strand must surely feel in his back from nights curled up in a twin extra-long like a teenager banished to summer camp. She approaches his desk and finds his email still open on the computer monitor, no privacy screen in sight. So much for information security. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Sometimes she forgets he has nearly twenty years on her.

She pokes at the mouse, and it accidentally opens one of Strand’s emails. She scans through it, but it’s just a submission from some _Black Tapes_ listener with a sense of humor (“I think a ghost is shrinking my clothes at night!”).

Since it’s already open, and since his office is her space as well, she doesn’t find poking the mouse again a necessarily _bad_ idea, certainly nothing in the realm of _problematic_.

Is that Nic she spies shaking his head in the corner of Strand’s office?

Her producer doesn’t say anything to her; he just gazes at her with a pity she finds particularly irritating.

“What’s your problem?”

He frowns.

“Rocks and glass houses, Nic. _I’m_ not the one that gets high on the job.”

He vanishes in a burst of smoke, and she closes her eyes to stabilize her emotional state. Nic isn’t here.

When she opens her eyes, the shadows greet her with fangs and claws and the dark rumble of their laughter. One lounges on Strand’s cot, snuggling into the sleeping bag like a dog in its bed. Its claws rip into the insulating layers of the cot.

“Fuck off,” she murmurs to the shadows, and returns to the task at hand.

She keys through some more listener submissions and unread Twitter notifications. There’s a reminder email for a second missed appointment with the dentist, and a few messages from Ruby about calls Strand missed while in Seattle. The mediocrity of the inbox of the most mysterious paranormal investigator she knows is a tragedy of Greek or Shakespearean proportions.

The office door creaks and she starts in fright. Over the monitor she spies the towering outline of a scraggly man.

Lovely. One very pissed-off looking Dr. Strand, at your service.

“Alex, _what-are-you-doing_ ,” he seethes in one rapid-fire breath, weary rage seeming to course through his body. Ruby’s right: he’s gotten skinnier.

“I was just waiting for you to return from your meeting. Ruby let me in.”

Strand the human bullshit detector marches over to his desk and shuts off the computer monitor. His look is one of pure betrayal.

“Your continued violations of all standards, professional, journalistic, hell, even _human_ , are almost impressive at this point… I’m not sure I can continue working with you.”

She plants her feet and jolts up from his office chair, all teeth and claws inherited from her shadowy companions.

“Don’t do this again,” she says into his face. His hands form fists on the desktop, the corded muscles of his shoulders tensing in ire under his sweater. “I’m _helping_ you. I put my whole job on the line for you. My producers and subordinates are doing work for you _just because you asked me_. You don’t get to leave again.”

“I’m not even sure you should continue working as a journalist. You’re obviously unwell. Whatever mental affliction you have is undercutting the capability you started out with.”

“‘Mental affliction’? What about you—shacked up in your disaster of an office like a 9/11 truther prepping for the end of the world?”

“Don’t hyperbolize,” he reprimands her, almost as if this is any other conversation instead of the battle it has become.

“I think it’s a pretty fair assessment.”

“I disagree. You see what you want—you always have, Alex. But why do you always have to keep digging into things that I’ve _told you before_ could create a safety issue?”

“Because you won’t _talk_ to me. Because you keep feeding me these bullshit lines,” she spits back.

“Contrary to your and your listeners’ belief, you don’t need to know everything,” he declares, using his height advantage to tower over her in authority. “What makes you think you’re entitled to _any_ of this?”

She replies without thought: “It’s because I love you.”

The planets halt their orbit, the earth stops rotating, the tides freeze as they crest on their high point, the birds hold the pitch they last chirped as if it’s the final note to a funeral march, and all that moves is her pounding heart and his heaving chest. They’re drowning in uneasy silence, but her confession is a long-held truth set free, and it runs laps around them like a neglected animal that hasn’t seen sunlight in years.

“What?” he asks in bewilderment, the tension deflating from his body. He unclenches his fists. Dr. Richard “Always-Has-an-Answer, Loves-to-Dominate-the-Conversation, Can-Monologue-for-Twenty-Minutes-Straight” Strand is rendered dumbfounded by her simple confession of feelings.

A few beats pass, and she starts to repeat her last words. They feel truer the second time she goes to acknowledge them. “I said it’s because I—”

He holds up a palm, signaling her to stop. He’s looking at the top of his desk, not at her.

“I heard you.” He pauses, eyes still cast down. “You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

His gaze finally meets hers. “Alex, I’m sorry, I’m not sure what to say.”

She won’t look away. She won’t.

“I’m so preoccupied with, well,” he gestures around the office.

“I know,” she says.

“I’m not sure what you expect from me.”

“Could you just… trust me? Can you at least try to?”

He sighs and falls back into the chair on his side of the desk. She follows, sitting back down into his desk chair.

“That would need to be a reciprocal agreement,” he comments.

“I know,” she says.

They fall into awkward silence. She toes the leg of his mahogany desk.

“I’ll do it if you will. It could be a good thing,” she says through a wavering smile.

“Perhaps,” he agrees.

(And the shadows impinging on the periphery cackle in delight.)

**Author's Note:**

> More on [willful blindness as a legal concept](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/willful-blindness-criminal-liability.html).


End file.
